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Else Blochwitz

Else Blochwitz (born in 1899) lived with her friend Margarete Dietrich in a big apartment on the Kürfürstendamm street in Berlin. Since the mid twenties, she was a well-known adversary of Nazism, and she actively manifested her dislike in the public activities of the NSDAP (German National Socialist Party). The Ministry of Nazi propaganda was amazed by how easily she expressed. However, she rejected any proposal to collaborate, and that is why she was put into special surveillance by the Gestapo.
After the Nuremberg laws (1935) she committed herself to helping Jews: she supported Jewish friends with their plans to emigrate and in the years 1938 till 1941 she temporarily accommodated refugees at her home. By rejecting to throw out her tenant and Jewish friend Herta Amdt, she was forced to place Star of David on the front door and from then on she just received ”Jewish feeding cards”, which represented a reduced feeding. Finally she could not avoid her friend Herta Amdt being deported in November 1941 in one of the trains to Minsk.
The total reach of supportive and rescue actions of Else Blochwitz and Margarete Dietrich is hard to reconstruct. Many of the refugees whom were accommodated at her house, or those whom they provided with feeding cards, didn’t know the real names of these two women, because they simply introduced themselves as the agreed pseudonym ”Black”. Due to her position of being responsible in the house against bombing raids, Else Blochwitz had knowledge of basements with no use, which were good as hideouts. Besides she wrote leaflets that she handed in during the bombing raids.
When the war was over, Else Blochwitz suffered according to her own testimony a ”total personal relapse”. She kept on sharing her apartment with Rita Grabowski, a Jew who lived with her from 1944 until the liberation.